Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/48690
Museums are upping their design quotient with major exhibitions, permanent collections Institutionalized and new acquisition funds to showcase design—many pieces of which have made their debut at Design Miami/. Tom Austin follows the trail from gallery to museum. If design is closing in on the contemporary art market with the same gestalt of highly prized and collectible ob- jects that are critically dissected, presented in museums, and finally sold, traded and auctioned with a certain fervor, it's only fitting that highly designed pieces would go from design galleries—many of which show at Design Miami/—to museums. This year at Design Miami/, the Paris-based Galerie Kreo is presenting new pieces by Martin Szekely, Heroic Carbon Shelves—classically severe black shelves—and the Glass+Glass table, an exquisite 2009 glass-topped table with legs of glass and stainless steel. The limited edition of eight pieces joins a new collection by Szekely, "Units," at their Paris gallery: that collection coincides with Szekely's retrospective at the Centre Pompidou—"Ne plus dessiner," or "No more drawing"—on view until January. At Design Miami/, Galerie Kreo is also showing pieces by Pierre Charpin, Adrien Rovero and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: the latter firm has a show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, "Bivouac," on view until July 30, 2012. The Bouroullec show is imagined as a temporary camp— hence bivouac—with everything from prototypes to hand- crafted pieces, featuring objects that are nomadic, organic and flexible. In London, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, New York's Moss gallery had an honor with this year's "Indus- trial Revolution 2.0: How the Material World will Newly Materialise." Moss collaborated with Materialise.MGX pro- ducing the first exhibition at the V&A Museum to solely feature 3D printed pieces. The show, which encompassed work by Stephen Jones, Patrick Jouin, Iris van Herpen and others, juxtaposed highly evolved, positively futuristic cre- ations with historical counterparts that served as inspira- tions. In the show, which closed this past October, pieces like the British milliner Stephen Jones' scanned and rein- terpreted "Bust of Lady Belhaven, 1827" from the V&A collection was featured, along with the "Escapism" dress by Iris Van Herpen and Daniel Widrig, which Moss currently has for sale. The Fractal table, which has also been placed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was acquired by the V&A and will be offered by Moss at Design Miami/. Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents the work of 86 CULTURED The interaction between museums and galleries has increased, notes Evan Snyderman, "Museums are calling us more and more, and there's a greater appreciation of design now."